Engineering education and entrepreneurship education: complementarity, opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Due to the downturn of global economies, high global unemployment rates, and dwindling economies at country specific levels, the increasing demand for soft skills, engineering education has shifted from the typical and traditional technical paradigm to a multidisciplinary approach. This has presented some challenges for engineering education. One of the challenges or opportunities is the inclusion of entrepreneurship education into the technical engineering curriculum. Although engineering graduates have the technical education and expertise, they are expected to become supervisors, managers and business owners. As such they are entrusted with resources (human, material and financial) to efficiently utilise and meet the goals of their respective organisations. Also, during the period of their study, engineering students may discover innovative ideas or design new experimental prototypes, which require further development and upscaling into full products that are ready for marketing. These require incubation, management and entrepreneurship skills. Therefore, there is the need to include entrepreneurship education in university engineering curricula. However, there is still an unending debate among engineering institutions and researchers on whether to include, and/or the extent of the inclusion of entrepreneurship and management modules in the engineering curricula. Furthermore, students in engineering entrepreneurship programmes gain insights into designing for end users working in, and managing interdisciplinary teams, communicating effectively, thinking critically, understanding business basics and solving open-ended problems (Byers, Seeling, Sheppard, & Weilerstein, 2013). Therefore, this study was designed to discuss the role entrepreneurship education plays in engineering education. The study first documented the existing and available literature on entrepreneurship education and engineering education, followed by examining the engineering students’ perceptions on entrepreneurship education in their engineering education curricula. The results indicated that, globally, many engineering institutions have in different ways infused entrepreneurship education into their curricula. However, research findings and participating engineering students have opposing views on the benefits and impacts of entrepreneurship education on future job prospects or owning self-business. The result of this study has implications for schools of business and engineering education.